DeepSummary
The podcast episode features an interview with Vincent Yelenti, a cultural anthropologist who studies nuclear waste cultures of expertise. Yelenti discusses his recent book 'Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now,' which is based on his fieldwork in Finland studying the Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository safety assessment project. He spent 32 months in Finland from 2012 to 2014, observing and interviewing experts who were developing forecasts of geological and ecological events that could occur in western Finland over the next tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years.
Yelenti explains how the Finnish experts combined various techniques, such as analogical reasoning, quantitative modeling, and qualitative scenario-making, to create tentative forecasts of distant future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and other potential events. He highlights the importance of anthropological engagement with these experts, co-theorizing with them to understand their styles of reasoning and knowledge practices.
The discussion also covers specific examples from Yelenti's fieldwork, including the use of analogies and models, the role of individual experts like the late 'Sepo,' and the broader implications of deep time thinking for addressing larger planetary challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss. Yelenti suggests that deep time reckoning can lead to cognitive shifts, changes in values and perspectives, and the cultivation of long-sighted societies.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Finnish nuclear waste experts employ a range of techniques, including analogical reasoning, quantitative modeling, and qualitative scenario-making, to develop forecasts of far-future geological and ecological events.
- Engaging with these experts anthropologically can provide insights into their styles of reasoning, knowledge practices, and approaches to navigating multi-scalar and multi-temporal challenges.
- Deep time thinking, or considering radically long-term timeframes, can promote cognitive shifts, changes in values and perspectives, and the cultivation of long-sighted societies.
- Anthropological engagement with experts in deep time reckoning can lead to the development of frameworks and techniques for integrating long-term thinking into everyday habits and addressing larger-scale planetary challenges.
- Yelenti's future work aims to explore how deep time thinking impacts individuals, organizations, and cultural perspectives, drawing on case studies such as the Long Now Foundation and indigenous knowledge systems.
- Analogies, models, and expertise play crucial roles in facilitating deep time reckoning, but also come with limitations and the potential for knowledge loss, as illustrated by the example of the expert 'Sepo'.
- Deep time thinking involves navigating tensions between individual idiosyncrasies and impersonal, hierarchical organizational systems, as well as grappling with the fragility and fleetingness of knowledge across vast timescales.
- Promoting deep time reckoning requires interdisciplinary collaborations, co-theorizing with experts, and translating their practices into accessible frameworks for wider adoption and application.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “So the idea is, let me write a book that can be useful to people outside of the nuclear waste community, that can help integrate deep time thinking into their everyday habits and sort of create institutional heuristics or blueprints that can be adopted outside the nuclear industry to build more long sighted societies.“ by Vincent Yelenti
- “So the book basically looks at a couple of case studies. One of them is the long now foundation. I did some fieldwork with them. I interviewed, say, Stuart Brand, the founder of the whole Earth catalog and founder of the foundation.“ by Vincent Yelenti
- “The book, the sort of anthropological labor is really about sort of co theorizing with them side by side about this. So it's about sort of absorbing or retooling or redeploying these sort of long sided patterns of reasoning that my informants use and repurposing them as techniques for making a deep time.“ by Vincent Yelenti
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
12/19/23